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dmraid support to d-i (Was Re: Yaird, grub and d-i should also support dmraid devices.)



Alle 14:37, domenica 6 novembre 2005, Frans Pop ha scritto:

> Actually, I'm not sure where this should go. You can also make a case that
> it should go into hw-detect's disk-detect.

I would go on with this idea too.

> If it does go into partman, it should probably go into the early
> initialization phase. After all, the device scan that partman does in its
> init phase needs to see the physical devices as one logical device and
> treat it as such.

Yes.

> I guess it depends on how the presence of dmraid can be determined:
> - does dmraid need to be loaded for that?

2 things for array detection: modprobe dm-mod and "dmraid -s -c" , see my 
previous post.

> - does it need to be loaded for all systems (would be bad) or can a
>   kind of preselection be made based on controllers that support it?

If the dmraid invoking gives us "No RAID disks" we could simply skip.


> Maybe discover could be used/extended for this?

We should ask discover maintainers to add a dmraid call if it 
finds /sbin/dmraid ?

> The alternative would be to leave selecting dmraid a manual process. In
> that case a menu item like we now have for LVM and SW-RAID could be added
> and partman would have to do a rescan after activation. IMO this would
> not really be very user friendly though.

Yes , bad for users and for us.

btw to activate dmraid we just need to call "dmraid --activate=yes", to get 
composing devices "/sbin/dmraid --raid_devices --format nvidia -cpath" which 
on my test system gives "/dev/sda \n /dev/sdb".

So my algorithm will be:

1 In the partman init we check for "dmraid -s -c", if no error we grep the 
format string name by splitting the output at char "_", this gives for 
examples "nvidia";
 1.1 more than 1 result could be shown if the machine has more that 1 software 
raid controller like my old asus k8 deluxe that had both nvidia and sil 
raids. More than 1 result means user had bios configures more than 1 raid 
array so more than 4 sata installed... should be a rare config but it is easy 
to support anyway.

2 We ask in high priority to enable it and in medium debconf we enable without 
asking.
 2.1 enabling requires to call "dmraid -a y nvidia" to enable only the found  
array or "dmraid -a y" to enable all, to hide partitions we could have listed 
with above mentioned commands.

3 Invoke partman on /dev/mapper/nvidia_jbdaccab and let the user proceed as 
usual.

All agree :-) ?

-- 
ESC:wq



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